a fiber blog by jackie pawlowski

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And in classic Jackie fashion, I haven’t blogged once in 6 weeks (despite immense crafty productivity in that time) leaving the present of our poor dead dog for any unfortunate soul who happened to stumble over here in the misguided search for knitting.

Merry Christmas y’all.

In this post, I shall attempt to catch you up on aforementioned 6 weeks, mostly in relation to crafty pursuits. In doing so, I hope to clear the plate for 2010, and all the crafty goodness planned therein.
Item the First: Cooking

Imagine for a second these three meager cookies multiplied by 80. Because last week we baked 20 dozen of them. (Yup. 20 dozen. 240 cookies. That is a crapload of cookies, as my kitchen slaves cookie helpers Eric and his sister Dena will tell you in hushed whispers when I am safely out of earshot.)

The ones pictured above are Peppermint Bark, and they were my favorite of the bunch. I am a sucker for the chocolate/peppermint combo. We also made Heath Bar Walnut Chocolate Chip cookies (everyone else’s favorite), and Peanut Butter cookies (Eric’s favorite) baked at a lower temperature to ensure maximum chewiness. All recipes were doubled for my holiday baking frenzy.

But it wasn’t just cookies. We made Mark Bittman’s quick coffee cake for breakfast one morning (easy and perfect), Alton Brown’s eggnog (transcendent), and Ina Garten’s Bloody Marys (strictly necessary, as I was hosting both of our families for Christmas this year. Also, add extra horseradish. Trust me.)

I was especially pleased with these simple yet impressive cream biscuits from Deb at Smitten Kitchen… I made the biscuits the day before and flash froze the formed, uncooked biscuits so that they were ready to bake just as we were carving the ham. It couldn’t have been easier, and they couldn’t have been more delicious.

Oh crap. I almost forgot.

We also made another treat from Smitten Kitchen – Sugar & Spice Candied Nuts. Perfect for packaging into mason jars and giving as a gift (which we did). (Yes, I put my sister-in-law to work on a project that was ultimately going to end up as an element to her Christmas gift. We already know that I am a bad person.)

The piece de resistance however, was the homemade caramel corn from Orangette. Mein Gott. How many foreign languages do I need to destroy to convey how amazing this was, and how proud I was of us for making it? Let’s leave it at two.

Wow, that was a crapload of cooking. I didn’t really expect that section to be so long, so I will leave it there for now, and regale you with my knitting tomorrow. In the meantime, I leave you with this:

And a sincere hope that your holidays are filled with the people you love, good food, and cozy environs.